Published

Content Creation vs Content Curation

I am sure every inbound marketer face this issue every working day. A true honest marketer would want to create content whereas the client/business owner would want to focus more on issues like ROI and scalability.

And since I have been on both the sides of the table, I can confidently say that the thrill of creating something original and seeing it go viral outweighs by far the satisfaction from simple curation. But having said, creating original content is mired with lots of problems like people dependency, slow execution and high production costs among others. So how should the decision be taken whether content should be created or curated?

Dilemma between Content Creation and Content Curation

All of us know content is king. With that logic, his (King’s) people would be end users who would consume that content. But for any Kingdom to flourish, King’s mannerism becomes very important. By mannerism, I mean how King rules his Kingdom. In the digital world, that mannerism is synonym with discovery/distribution channels like Search Engines, Social Media, Emails etc.

Therefore for King to serve his people satisfactorily, King must observe his mannerism (discovery/distribution channels). Put in another way, most critical thing to observe (at the time of content production) is that discovery agents (and majorly Search Engines) treat that content unique and worth revealing to end users. And it is not necessary that worthiness comes only from creation. It is absolutely possible with curation as well as Boundless has proved.

Boundless is the perfect example of how curation is put to use. It aggregates content from multiple sources and then chaff them and puts them neatly in different buckets. The output is not only liked by end users but also loved by investors.

So the question should be -

“Is the content (being produced) considered worthy enough by Search Engines to show to end users?”

So any business owner/marketer needs to answer this question first. There is quite a possibility that original content is also not considered worthy enough to be shared whereas curated content is making raves.

Hence after that question, whether to create or curate depends entirely on the budget and the commitment from all the stakeholders.